Originally developed by Jer Thorp and Mark
Hansen for nytlabs,
Cascade is a tool that affords the ability to see how a link is disseminated
through retweets on Twitter. It presents this data as a tree structure allowing
users to navigate the dissemination of a link over time by moving through
parent-child relationships. The first version was written in
Processing and was specifically designed to be
installed in the lab. I was brought on the project to port it to something that
could appear in a web page.

Using a similar strategy of what I employed in the creation of
Delta, I made extensive usage of shaders to off-load a lot of
the processing time devoted to moving points around. Each vertex contained all
the information needed to describe its location in different contexts and modes
so that despite the in-memory static geometry the points could animate and tween
individually based on their specific vertex attributes. This amounted to an
optimized version that could individually animated hundreds and
thousands of tweets inside the browser with WebGL.